Is Stoicism the Secret to a Good Life?

Here's what is really fascinating when you look at Stoicism.

Stoicism has two really famous names attached to it.

One of them is Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome at the time, the most powerful person alive.

And the other is a man named Epictetus.

Epictetus was born a slave and he was owned by another man.

He had a crippled leg and he owned nothing.

And so you're talking about two humans at the absolute opposite ends of power and they arrived at the exact same conclusions.

And so here's why this is important.

It means the playbook has nothing to do with your circumstances in life.

It worked for a man who owned the entire world and it worked for a man who had absolutely nothing.

So stoicism is considered a philosophy, not a religion, but I like to think of it more than anything else as mental and life training.

Because a philosophy is something that you can agree with and something that you live by, but training is something that you actually do, okay? And so let me go through the four lessons with you that I think will really change your life.

Number one is this, sort everything into two buckets, okay? Let me explain what I mean by that, okay? This is the center of the whole thing.

Epictetus said it very plainly.

Some things are up to us and some things are not.

That's it.

So your effort, your attitude, your mindset, your standards, your response to life, what you say, what you think, what you do next, all of that, that's yours.

On the other side of it, the other bucket, if you've got traffic and the economy and the weather and your ex and what people's opinions of you might be or whether somebody does or does not text you back, none of those things are yours.

They never have been.

And where most people get this wrong is they don't sort everything in life into those two buckets.

They take all of it, both buckets, and they carry around the whole pile all day long trying to control everything.

And if you want to burn yourself out quickly, try to control everything.

And so people wonder why they're tired all the time.

And the reason why is because they're trying to control what they cannot control.

I don't know about you, but that sounds really exhausting, doesn't it? So you're not tired because your life is hard.